1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a recording medium like an optical disk where data of different purposes or kinds, such as compressed motion picture data and audio data, are to be recorded, an apparatus and method of recording data on this recording medium, and an apparatus and method of reproducing data from the recording medium.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, a great amount of attention has been being paid to a data recording/reproducing system which records, a plurality of movie data (pictures), audio streams, sub-picture channels and the like on a recording medium, such as an optical disk, and reproduces any movie data, audio stream and sub-picture channel which are arbitrarily selected from the recorded data by a user. A program chain is a set of virtually linked pictures and audio data as programs for each scene in a movie or the like. The presence of a plurality of program chains on a recording medium means that a single movie can have a plurality of story developments. Different speech can be associated with a single picture by recording a plurality of audio streams. Further, recording a plurality of sub-picture channels allows subtitles or the like of, for example, different languages to be displayed.
In reproducing a file with a complex structure which includes groups of data that are to be selectively reproduced in the same time slot on the same time axis, the presence of a plurality of program chains, audio streams, sub-picture channels, etc. in the file should be previously presented to a user so that the user can select the desired information for each item.
Conventionally, however, nothing has yet been specified for the description of such file structure information.
Therefore, there is a demand for a system which can allow users to easily check or select the contents of data recorded on an optical disk.